


Eclipses of Poets

by byzantienne



Series: In Nomine: the Company [6]
Category: In Nomine
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-22
Updated: 2014-11-17
Packaged: 2018-02-10 00:16:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2003496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/byzantienne/pseuds/byzantienne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Valentin, renegade Nightmares Knight, comes to Stygia, makes several new acquaintances, and ceases to be one thing while becoming another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

_What shall I do, by nature and trade_   
_a singing creature (like a wire -- sunburn! Siberia!)_   
_as I go over the bridge of my enchanted_   
_visions that cannot be weighed, in a_   
_world that deals only in weights and measures?_   
_(from "The Poet (1927)", Marina Tsevataeva)_

**1\. DAOSHENG**

The air tastes different where you are. There's no circulation in Stygia – oh, there are winds, whipping terrible things screaming down the canyons and up under the skirts of unsuspecting demons crouched in caves – but it all goes around and around, and it makes the air taste – not _stale_ , just different. Like you're stealing it from someone else's lungs, and isn't that just appropriate for your new Word and your new home? Stealing the _air._ You've thought of it before, of course, a sort of drowning thing, a nightmare of sucking lungs and sudden inhospitability, but isn't this nicer? Drinking up someone's stolen air without working for it. Just you lying here in this carved-out stronghold, on a completely gorgeous bed, breathing someone else's air.

Breathing your Marquis's air. She's so compact, this woman you've let talk you into working for her, all one thing, Forces a little knot of power, as many as yours – almost! You think. Her partner just the same, except stiller and quieter and better at minutiae. But it's Daosheng lying next to you on the absurd bed – who has _beds_ in Stygia, isn't everyone a barbarian, especially everyone in Theft? Aren't _you_ a barbarian, Valentin, a desperate grasping scrambling thing, trying so hard to hold onto what you're losing despite yourself?

Aren't you, though. Valefor took you for all you've got.

Daosheng leans over and taps you on the upper lip with her fingernail, says, "You're distracted, Valentin," which you are. You're supposed to be reading to her. You've got a whole book in your hands, a lovely old book with illustrations in illuminate and ink, some artifact liberated out of the Archive and Daosheng wanted – what? A bedtime story. Called you in here to her and pointed at the book and got you to come up onto the bed and curl into her side – she's warm, she has absolutely no right to be as warm as she is, ragged-winged and dark-eyed against you. She can't turn the pages herself. Not without gloves.

It's a pretty Discord to go with a pretty Calabite. You said so, back when you weren't sure if you wanted to hurt her or be hurt by her or whatever this third thing is that you're doing  
instead.

"I am," you say, "I'm thinking, Daosheng," and you turn the page. On the next leaf is a Balseraph all worked in white. A very fanciful Oblivion, you think. "A very fanciful Oblivion," you say, exactly the same, exactly what you mean.

"It's a very fanciful book." She grins. Her teeth are white and sharp and oh, you don't want to be hurt anymore but you'd like them sunk into your lip where her finger was, wouldn't you? "But I like it anyhow. The poetry's good."

"Of course you like it," you say. You're so brazen, you're delighted with yourself. You were never this way with – well. Anyone else who could stand a chance of ripping you apart. (You think of spider-legs, and lamprey maws, and the skittering shadows and the immensity of the dark, and then you think you prefer this small dangerous thing next to you, and knowing you've been stolen, even if it isn't – the same. The same would have hurt, and don't you want to stop hurting?)

"I picked it because _you'd_ like it," says Daosheng. "And I've been meaning to read it anyway."

"Oh, and I'd like anything with terribly bitter and vicious history, all done up in meter, would I?" You smile.

She smiles. Oh, Valentin, you're half gone and you wish you weren't, she could leave you so bereft, and all she's done is ask you to turn pages.

"Not _anything,"_ she says. "The meter has to be good. And the viciousness has to be less than the bitterness. Am I right, sweetheart?"

Make that all gone. She should have been an Impudite, that would have been fair.

You say so. "There's nothing fair about you."

She – ah, ah, you can't even find words for what she does. Her hands on your wings, between the struts, warm, and you shiver so _hard._

"Close the book, Valentin," Daosheng says, and you do, without looking at your hands. You put the paper away where it can't even touch her. (Next to you, on the bed. On your other side. You're between her and it, and have you _ever_ wanted to stand in front of someone and keep them safe? What are you, a Djinn? What are you even _doing,_ Valentin?)

She climbs into your lap, which you expected, the lovely warm press of her thighs on either side of your hips, and you think – yes, you will, you would like to, and you say, "I thought you wanted to hear a story," and you reach out and snag the hem of her blouse between your fingers, scrape the pads over the embroidered edge.

"I do," says Daosheng, "I think you'll tell me one just fine." She is tracing the edge of your jaw, and you turn your head, tip your mouth into her palm and smile into the skin. The strands of your hair get into your eyes, a fall of pale gold-white obscuring everything. Your throat is exposed and you're spreading your wings out against the headboard and you have hardly been touched.

This is ridiculous. You wonder what she's afraid of, don't you? You wonder what you can take away from her – better, more appropriate – and you trace the tip of your tongue over the palm of her hand and bite gently at the pad of her thumb. She makes the _softest_ sound. Her wings come around you like a cloak and the torn edges are textured like the embroidery on her blouse and you get your fingers under that and on her ribs. It's not like you need to breathe in Hell, but she does it like a habit and you appreciate the hitch in the rise and the smoothness of the fall.

"Is that why you brought me home?" you murmur into her skin. "I can make a thousand worlds, and none of them are here –"

"Start here," Daosheng says. The hand you haven't been kissing is down between you and gathering the layers of your skirt up around your hips. You want to spread your legs, vividly, want to be lying under her wide open. You wonder if you've acquired some kind of deathwish, wandering in the mountains, picked it up like loose change out of a pocket, this desire to let someone else in – oh, be specific, Valentin -- to let _Daosheng_ in. (Would you do this for the other one? For Chaixin? You think you might. That is perhaps worse, she isn't even _here,_ she isn't cupping her hand over you and petting you with her fingertips and holding your thighs close together between hers, closer than you want, and you _still would._ )

You're propped up against the headboard, her wings flush with yours, so you can wrap both your hands around her ribcage, fasten them where her shoulderblades are becoming her wings, and pull her down against you. She laughs, breathlessly. Your cheek has ended up pressed to her chest and you shut your eyes and her fingers are sinking into you.

You unravel like you mean it.

Sex in Hell isn't like sex anywhere else, there isn't the slightest bit of barrier between substances here, no entertaining vessel to go slick and desperate and distracting, no hysteria of images that are realer than real to tell a fantasy with. You're not having sex with your mind and you're not having sex with a pretty shell, your self is all pressed up against Daosheng's self and she feels like the static fray of white noise – that's entropy, so close, right here and right now, you think: your poor skirt, these very nice bedsheets, oh well – like noise and like the deckled edge of the pages of the book you were reading and she presses in and through and you do mean it, you go all to pieces for her.

It takes ages, and you like every part. Afterward you're holding on like she's a pylon and the tide is going out. You want to be left on the shore.

She touches your cheek with the hand that was between your legs and you expect her fingers to be wet to the knuckle but this is Hell, of course, and they're not. You suck them into your mouth anyhow.

The sound Daosheng makes is entirely approval. Then she settles down on top of you, her hands crossed at the wrist on your chest and her chin resting on them and her wings still spread over you. You're about the same height, leaving aside her horns. This is a very silly thing to be concerned with just now.

"Your eyes, Valentin," she says to you. "If I had a mirror I'd show you what you look like right now."

"Terrified?" you say.

"Are you?"

"Less than I should be."

She kisses you, which she hasn't done before, not on the mouth. (The cheek, outside in the street, the instant before you knew she was a Marquis. The instant before she kissed Chaixin like she's kissing you now and the world twisted around you and you weren't sure what sort of twist it was: freefall revelation or inevitable horror or just being _surprised,_ you keep being surprised, it aches like popping soapbubble dreams.) You kiss her back, you bruise your tongue on her teeth and wrap your fingers in her hair and aren't you just clinging on a bit too hard, you know it, you know it and you don't change what you're doing.

She lets you, which is an indulgence you will have to pay for. Someday.

Not now.


	2. Chapter 2

**2\. STYGIA**

You are in a cave. You have been in a cave -- a series of caves, and also a canyon between them, and for some excruciating hours clinging to the side of a mountain by your fingernails and tearing pearls off the cuffs of your coat -- for an amount of time which feels more endless than it has any right to.

Put it this way, Valentin: you have been running for three days at least, which is only long enough for Thieves to get away from something. (You're not a Thief. They are a little swarm around you, and you are not sure of one quarter of the things you were sure of three days ago, but you are sure you are not a tiny mosquito of a person.)

Your boots are soundless on the rock floor. This cave is a dance hall and a drinking establishment, and someone has painted its ceiling in garish sprawls of gold and red and pink. Lurid, you think.

"Lurid," you say to the bartender, and it takes this observation for a drink order and presents you with a highball glass full of viscous fuchsia fluid. You will give this cave precisely this much: the drinks match the ceiling. The bartender has left a portion of itself on the outside of the glass, a smear of Shedite effluvia which squelches under your fingertips. You catalog, out of long habit, the ways in which this moment could turn horrific: the tacky excrescence you are touching, and how it could spread is the best option. The inevitable cave-in, the most amateur.

Neither will happen. This is _Hell_ , and nothing you can imagine will shape itself from your impulse merely from your shaping it. You do not belong here. You may never be where you belong again.

You drink your drink. You do not wipe off your fingers, even when some Habbalite comes to take your wrist and match you palm for palm down the long row of dancers. You do not know her and you hardly care to. She asks you where you're from -- it is certainly not here, and pretty children like this one are always looking for news from other Principalities to bring home to her -- what is it that is in favor with Factions, this decade? Her political party? Charming concept. You tell her, Shal-Mari, which is not even a lie.

You came through Shal-Mari on your way in.

You could tear her limb from limb, with only your teeth and your nails to steer by. She is that much smaller than you.

You leave her panting at the end of the reel. It isn't even worth the _time_.

There were plenty of other Principalities to choose from. You have no idea what possessed you to pick Stygia. Aside from how not one person who knew you would have any idea either. (Shal-Mari, certainly. Who didn't go to Shal-Mari, every so often? If you had to be in Hell, there were worse places -- you are in one -- and there was a degree of effervescent inspiration in its sheer banal consumption. You could almost enjoy Shal-Mari.

Why you didn't hike all the way to Abbadon, now, that even you can't understand. Perhaps you would like to sit very still and watch something rot.)

You sit, very still, at a corner table, and you order another drink of the same type, and you pay in Essence like the aristocrat you were until _ever_ so recently. Also at this table are: a waif of an Impudite, so small she might have fledged just this morning; a Habbalite whose cravat has come unpinned, as if someone else has had their hands in it; and a Calabite in a flat cap and a pretty dress, with a single smudge of cave-dust under her cheekbone like a beauty mark. They all have drinks. Everyone has drinks!

You'd put your head down on the table and weep if weeping was something you did, and if you weren't sure the Impudite wouldn't pick your pockets if you stopped paying attention for even a moment.

There isn't even anything _in_ your pockets. You ran to Hell like a chased cur, empty-handed, shrugging into your coat and your best boots and a hat -- you lost the hat on the mountain -- and running before the hollowness in your chest swallowed you right up. You used to have a Heart, and that helped to prevent the swallowing.

The Calabite taps the edge of your glass with one manicured nail, filed down round and even. She takes care of herself like an Impudite. What an affectation!

"Are you drinking this, or are you staring at it?" she asks.

"Are these exclusive options?" you inquire. "I was considering both, sequentially."

She takes the drink away, and she drinks it for you. "They were," she says. "Now they're not."

"Now there are neither," you say.

"Whatever will you do?"

Stealing back the half-empty glass is beneath you, marked up by her lipstick or not. "Inquire as to why a woman like you wanted a drink so badly you were willing to settle for mine," you say.

"Curiosity," she says. "Ought I buy you a new one?"

You're here in Hell in enough finery – even minus those torn-away pearls – to make it clear you can afford your very own drinks, and this Calabite insinuates you into poverty and desperation, just like that. It's –

Compelling, honestly, or perhaps it's just that you're terribly terribly bored of people who are afraid of you.

"No," you say, and you take her wrist between your fingers and hold it and the glass still so you can sip at what's left. Her lipstick tastes like wax. You get it on your teeth, red traces like you've been eating barely-seared meat. "This one is fine."

"It's not," says the Calabite. "It's terrible."

"Yes," you agree.

She considers you, evenly, her wrist still in your hand. (In another world you could leave bruises that would bloom to fungus and wirework and she'd know to pull away. That world isn't where you are.) "Where would you be if you weren't here?" she asks you.

"Existentialism, and we've only just met," you protest.

She grins. Her teeth are just barely pointed, every last one. "I'm Daosheng."

You'd tip your hat, if you still had a hat. If you weren't still holding her wrist. "Valentin," you say.

"There. Now we're introduced."

"So we are." You're stalling. You aren't entirely sure why. You could let her go and smile and take your leave and go be somewhere else entirely, so easily, and yet you aren't doing any of these things.

"Excellent," says Daosheng. "Is it that you like dancing, Valentin? It can't be that you like terrible drinks, why you're here. You'd have resented being stolen from more."

"What makes you think I don't resent you just _awfully?"_ you say.

"You're still holding on to my wrist," she says. So you are. And then you're not, and she's still smiling at you, freed entirely from where you'd caught her with a single twist. Calabite of _Theft._ You wonder what else she's stolen from you besides your drink.

"You are cheating," you say.

"Yes," she agrees. "But so are you. Sitting in here in pearls and taking advantage of the lights. Why haven't you tried to Charm me yet?"

You have no idea.

"Is that what you like?"

"I like a great number of things. Where would you rather be?"

The Marches, you think. "I assume I can't ask for better company."

She laughs. "You can ask."

You don't ask. You say, "Here is quieter than Shal-Mari," which is not an answer but ought to serve to determine what Daosheng _really_ wants to know.

"Everywhere is quieter than Shal-Mari. Will you dance with me, Valentin?"

What she wants is apparently your company. Well. You are the most interesting person in this bar. You could understand the desire, even if you are somewhat dubious about your own company this particular evening.

"In rows?" you ask. "Why is line-dancing in fashion in Stygia?"

"Because it is in fashion in Tuscaloosa." She takes your hands. It is completely different than when you had her wrist; she's holding your fingers like you are fragile. Something that ought not to be dropped. "Where's your favorite place on Earth?"

You stand up. She is almost of a height with you. You think she'll try to lead. "The Sivash, in the Ukraine."

"The Sea of Azov. Why?"

"So many questions," you say. "You must be so bored."

"Not anymore. Dance with me, Valentin."

You dance with her. She makes you lead. You are chagrined and you are intrigued and you meant to keep running. This isn't far enough. And she knows your name. This isn't far enough at all. (She knows your name and she is clever and lovely and she will dissolve under the paw and talon of your former Princess like anyone. Everyone does. Tears down their faces and choking on fearstruck snot. Confession that doesn't make anything stop. You are so tired of it and you are so scared. And you don't falter one step, so that's something. That's something right there.)

She kisses your cheek when the reel is over. At home, the kiss would burn and scar and gleam silver and that'd be thank-you enough between the two of you, everything finished and done. Here it is -- you don't know what it is. You're not from Shal-Mari, no matter how many little demons have asked you what angel you fucked to get your Knighthood.

(None.)

"You should stay longer than you're planning to," says Daosheng.

"Whatever makes you think I'm leaving," you say. You are breathing a little quickly, from the dancing, and so is she, and she has the trick of breathing in time with her partner. You think she knows how to dance with someone other than you, often and well.

"I wasn't under the impression you thought I was unobservant, Valentin," she says. She says your name like it's a prize she's won. (Stolen.) "Or unintelligent."

"Never either."

"Stay longer than you're planning to."

"Why?"

You sound plaintive, which you hadn't meant to sound. You are unraveling, very slowly, like the threads holding your coat together. You are entirely aware of the fact. Awareness never helps. You can know you're dreaming and dream all the same. Those are the worst dreams, sometimes. For clever observant people. The absolute worst.

She puts a card into your hand. It is not made of paper, which is quite peculiar. It is a little tag of metal, like a flattened coin. It has her name, in Chinese characters and in Helltongue glyphs. "Because someone asked. Because you have nowhere better to go."

You could deny it.

"Surely there are better bars than this," you say instead.

_"Lots,"_ says Daosheng. "I'll see you at one."

You think she won't. You think you won't let yourself be snagged so easily. You think you'll run like running is something written into you.

Oh, Valentin. How wrong can you be?

* * *

First you stand on the street in what passes for downtown in Stygia and spend a fruitful five minutes avoiding crowds with placards and a set of grubby demonlings – all fingers! Surely they'll be canny little Djinn, grasping at ankles – and considering your options.

You determine to be realistic about your situation. You will not dance around the very actual and very present problems which you are currently facing. You are going to be responsible, for yourself at least, considering that being responsible for anyone else is no longer in any way a concern.

(You are certainly not responsible for Daosheng. She introduced herself to _you._ When some dread thing tears apart her mind looking for you, that will not be your fault.)

Here is your problem: you have abandoned your Prince and your Principality. You have shattered the most precious and perfect and singing part of you, and you are quite thoroughly lost without it, and you are going to be hunted mercilessly down and rendered to scraps.

Also the wind never stops in Stygia and it has gone up your skirt.

Clearly you ought to do something.

You lean against a lamppost and let the light get caught on your cheekbones. You probably look like a penny dreadful novel. It is extremely juvenile of you.

There are some traditional next steps, at this point. You could get violently and thoroughly hauled in by the agents of the Game, as a traitor to all Hell in general, but this would be boring, for you and for them, and they'd only turn you over to -- well. She'd come for you, in Hades. Djinn get along. Little grasping fingers.

You could continue running. You have a vessel. You decorated it, last time you were on the corporeal, and you could find a Tether locus that would spit you out some place you could sell the decorations. You'd have yourself a suitable operating budget for disappearing completely.

And then what, Valentin? 

And then some angel picks you up like a coin off the pavement, that's traditional in these situations. Isn't it.

How awful. You spend a fanciful moment contemplating the sort of Words they have in Heaven. All of them are absurd. The Dreamers most of all; they'd know you for what you were and try to murder you before you could corrode their pretty white wings to oilslicks and rust. Not a chance. The rest aren't much better: regiments and armies and green growing things. Or the sort that insist that one oughtn't be cruel. 

And then some angel picks you up like a coin off the pavement and throws you back in a gutter. God knows where _you've_ been.

That won't do then, will it.

What you need is some walls between you and the vast reaches of the night. A set of hands around your ribcage. (You will not think _heart_ ; you know you ought to.) You want to be safe. You want to be hidden. You want, when you are honest with yourself, to stop the sick hurt that is radiating through you like every memory of sunlight.

You are going to join a monastery.

You add the capitals, inside your head. You are going to join The Monastery. You are practically a secret already.

* * *

There is an episode with a cable-car which you are glossing over. The less said about public transportation in Stygia, the better.

From this approach, the Monastery is a mess of onion domes and pagodas and walled gates. It is forbidding. Parts of it have flaking gold leaf and what might either be extremely ugly, extremely still Djinn, or else cunning carved gargoyles nestled in the battlements. You walk up a steep and winding path. Your skirt tangles around your calves and road-dust gets in your mouth and your eyes. You think yourself a petitioner. An acolyte. A political refugee.

There is of course a doorkeeper. A tall Horror who has put out her own eyes, or had someone do it on her behalf. The sockets are blackened. (A poker, you think. Something cauterizing.) She hears you coming and holds up one hand, _halt, stranger_. The lower half of her face is very beautiful, and much of it is covered with a half-mask.

You are prepared for all sorts of sideways, fluttering questions. Theft was bad enough! Secrets will be cleverer and worse!

Instead she says to you, "Do you have anything worth the entrance fee?" That hand flips over, becomes an expectant receptacle.

You have your coat, but you _like_ your coat.

"How is worth accounted?" you ask.

You think she smiles, but it is quite difficult to tell. "Which door would you prefer?"

"I was not aware I had options," you say. "There's only the one door."

"This door is a material example of a possible door."

Everyone's a philosopher. It must be in fashion. "And if I went around to the other side?"

"There would be another door," says the doorkeeper, cheerfully, "and another doorkeeper."

You are still _so bored_. You fold your hands on your hips and ruin the line of your coat. "I assume you want a secret."

"That is a currency," the doorkeeper informs you. 

You wonder if it matters, that this is the first time you are going to tell the truth in this Principality you are planning on making your own. It ought to matter. It likely doesn't. This Habbalite will not remember your _name_. "Four Servitors of Nightmares were soul-killed by a pack of ethereals four days ago. There were political repercussions. Let me in."

The Habbalite waves at the door, which is now a hole in the wall, black and unseeing. There's nothing _there_ on the other side. You've built doors like that before. They are a cheap trick. You go right in, like you've never been afraid of anything in your life.

Naturally on the other side there is a courtyard and a great number of demons wandering around in masks and robes and having little whispered conferences in shadowed corners and under twisted trees. There is a hand at your elbow. A demonling -- nearly tall enough to fledge, wide-eyed and wide-mouthed with cheekbones decent enough to hint at a future as an Impudite -- holds out a selection of colored veils. 

"Would you like a mask?" it asks.

You assume you ought to like a mask. 

What you do is reach out and slice a line of red with your nails across the demonling's face, and when it cries you use the veils to gently pat away the blood. It doesn't stop crying. You wind a grey silk scarf around its face and a blue one around yours -- yours has a spot of blood over the nose that makes everything smell like iron -- and then you Charm it stupid. It has lovely manners now. It sits with you under one of the trees and puts its head on your knee and tells you all about Secrets while you stroke its hair and try not to think about how easy it would be to drain it dry and just shut your eyes and wait for something to happen to you like you've happened to this child.

This was supposed to _help_.

"Are you afraid?" you ask the demonling.

"I love you," it says, and its eyes are all pupil, like someone's drowned it. Almost as good. In truth, it's just like the child had said _yes, so much I can't think_. At this particular moment in your life you are sure of the nature of love: love is the place in the soul that is hollowed out by fear. Fear blanks the eyes and frees the tongue and carves a space that fills up with a bloom of love. 

You ask your demonling to take you somewhere beautiful, somewhere it likes. It holds your hand in the hallways and walks you down a maze of corridors. No one here looks at anyone else. Everyone is masked; everyone's eyes slide off mouths and shoulders and tilework instead of catching on another set of eyes. There is a sussuration of footsteps. You want to scream until all the masks shatter and there is flesh to get your hooks into. Instead your demonling shows you into a tiny stone room with one arrowslit window; the walls are lined with scrolls in little scroll-slots. 

"You like it here?" you ask.

"I'm the only one I know who can read these," it says. You stroke its hair and pull a scroll at random.

"You still are," you tell it. "I don't know this language at all." It's not Helltongue nor Classical Chinese nor Greek nor Hebrew, and with that you are out of old languages to play with. The letters hang from long lines of ink like overripe fruits.

You don't know what to do with yourself. This is a room full of secret knowledge, locked up, and even if you made your demonling teach you to read it it would take months or years before you'd read enough to do something interesting with it and _who would you even tell_ , Valentin. What masked person would want to know? 

You are, late in life, discovering a hankering for directed action. Or that you've acquired a habit for it, and like all habits, you crave the doing of it in an ugly and desperate fashion.

The demonling follows you, half a step behind and to your left, while you pace its miniscule sanctuary. You play with it a little: you see what it will do when it isn't Charmed, but this turns out to be the same things it does when it is, other than developing a new connivingness and a tendency to ask you intrusive questions. You pretend you are already a servitor of its Prince and refuse to answer, and when you get bored -- you're so very bored -- you Charm it again and make it teach you the alphabet its scrolls are written in. 

There is a little satisfaction there: you have taken away its sole marker of individuality. 

You know this isn't going to work. 

You knew when you told the doorkeeper the truth.

You aren't a Balseraph; you can't stay convinced of something blatantly wrong for more than a few hours. Also you've shreds of dignity left to you and you cannot imagine -- you, being unable to imagine something! -- what would happen to you if you stayed in this little room and read these little scrolls and hoped someone would notice you but not enough to make you _obvious_. Secrets abhors the obvious. You are a slippery and slick creature and you are still too obvious for this place.

Because the demonling was amusing, you don't kill it on your way out.

Of course there are no doors with clear markers. Of course there is a maze. Of course you are lost. You said it yourself: you're practically a secret already. It is always more difficult to get free than to get _in_. Who wouldn't want to keep you? (You could stay lost. If you did, you wouldn't stay you. It isn't the worst idea. It's not enough of a good one to make you stop your hunting through the maze. Not yet.)

After the maze (you can solve a maze; you've built enough to know how to count turnings), the compass ceases to be your friend.

You walk down a corridor, and it spins you like a top. You are facing the maze again.

You turn and walk down the corridor, as you meant to. You spin. You walk right into the maze.

You try it with your eyes shut.

You try it while walking backwards, which results in you entering the maze ass-first.

Eventually you realize you can avoid spinning if you scuttle sideways like a crab, keeping your shoulderblades tight against the corridor wall. This becomes somewhat unfortunate when you reach the end of the corridor and gravity spins instead of you.

Falling down takes forever each time you've done it. The slow drop. You have time to reach out with your fingertips and graze the tapestries lining the well.

The bottom is, naturally, water. Your poor coat. First the cuffs, and now this. At least it isn't silk.

There is an interminable time in the sludge under the monastery, during which you regret each portion of your decisions in coming to this place and leaving it again. You are spat back out on a streetcorner, where the wind dries you to chills. Stygia, again. Lamplight. Placards. (How many political parties _are there_ \-- it is Factions, Valentin, that is a very stupid question.)

You want to be drunk, and you want to kill someone, and you want to show the parts to someone else, someone who'd care, afterward.

The first ought to be achievable, at least.


	3. Chapter 3

**3\. CHAIXIN**

Daosheng has left you on the bed wearing nothing but the remains of your skirt clinging to your thighs in frayed strips. You are waiting for her to come back, since she told you to stay when she climbed off of you and vanished, her hair all in tangles down her neck and the laces on her blouse hardly laced, disappearing down the hall.

You could go get your coat from where you'd hung it on the coatrack by the door when you came in, but the air is as warm as your skin and you aren't sure she wouldn't mind. You want so much to not make her mind what you do _on accident_. Only deliberate harm for you. This is how you are currently justifying yourself to yourself. You stretch out on the bed like a starfish and touch the corners with your toes and fingertips.

It isn't Daosheng who comes back through the door. It is Chaixin.

It requires more effort than you had strictly expected to not curl up like a startled pillbug, all your limbs pulled in protectively around your innards. 

She isn't about to _hurt_ you, Valentin. She asked you to stay, just like Daosheng did. They were both there. They're practically _married_ , like a pair of humans might be. You have no reason to be afraid. (You have every reason to be afraid, and you will never stop being afraid, and you are not sure you can comprehend what a lack of fear would entail here.)

She sits on the edge of the bed and looks you over. You hold yourself still -- stiller yet, when she reaches out two fingers and touches the bare flesh over your hipbone. 

"Hello, Chaixin," you say.

There is absolutely nothing about Chaixin that hesitates. She is all _decision_. When she moves she moves all in one piece. You think you'd love to see her in combat. You think she'd _destroy_ you, unless you took her to the Marches, and she'd never let you take her. Her hand folds into your hair and sweeps through it, affectionate like the swipe of a tiger's paw. Stunning.

"Daosheng implied you'd need new clothes," she says, "but I see she understated the case."

You want to roll over and bury your head in the pillows and giggle. Daosheng sent Chaixin in here to _dress you up_. You are beginning to realize that the two of them have given you to each other as some sort of present.

"I could follow you around without them, but other people might get peculiar impressions," you say. Bravado has not deserted you.

Chaixin is as expressionless as a Djinn, except for her eyes. "Clothing you will not make you less peculiar," she says, which is as good as smiling. "You might as well be appropriate."

"I have my doubts that I am capable."

Her weight lifts off the bed. You sit up in her wake, your elbows balanced on your knees. "You know better," she says, "than to think I'm susceptible to self-deprecation."

You are lucid and your tongue is light in your mouth and somewhere in this carved-out stronghold you have a new-made Heart; the song under your skin is _keep going_ , is _take everything you can_. So you say: "I would tear out my organs for you, Chaixin," and when she turns to look at you again, you go on, "and I would crawl over them bleeding for Daosheng. As if I need self-deprecation."

She clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth, a quiet considering noise. 

"Come here, Valentin," she says.

You stand up. She is already across the room, by the coatrack and the door.

"No," she says when she catches sight of you. "On your knees."

It is five steps. Seven at most. You kneel and you go to her kneeling. The floor is a stone that will bruise if you keep your weight settled like this for long. But you are lighter than air.

Chaixin's fingers fold into your hair; you are at precisely the right height for it. You shut your eyes and open them again. When you look up she is watching your face. You wonder what you look like to her. _Open_ , you suspect, and you should be more concerned about that than you are. When was the last time you did something exactly as you meant to, without any suggestion, any influence? When was the last time you were your own creature? Oh, never. Never, but you used to pretend.

"Good," she says. (You are light and you are tethered by her hand and by the floor pressing up against your knees. Later you will laugh at yourself for this. Later you will tell Daosheng that her partner took one hand to you and you went as submissive as a kitten and the two of you will snicker like schoolgirls at your plight. But right now you are ephemeral. Where you exist is where she's put you.)

"What do you want?" you ask.

"Hold out your hands."

You do.

Chaixin picks up the sleeve of your much-abused coat in one hand, and with the opposite fingernail she traces the threads which still hold what's left of the pearls to the cuffs. The thread dissolves. Not _breaks_ , but dissolves under precision use of her resonance while you watch. The pearls slide, trembling on the verge of being free. She catches them before they can fall.

"Daosheng tricked you, because you were desperate and trapped," she says, every word as clean as her resonance on the thread, "and our Prince stole you because that is his nature and his effect. I find you less of a threat inside our company than outside it. I will take your liver and your lungs and every Force of you, Valentin, I will take everything you said you'd give me, every skill you have and each desire, and I will use them. That's what we do. We're Theft. You will be an extension of our hands. Did you mean it?"

You don't even have to say yes. 

The pearls fill your palms, spill gold and rose and blue and grey through the lace of Chaixin's fingers.

There is a little while of quiet, where she lets you breathe, and lean against the coatrack and also her thigh.

Then she says, briskly, "I have no idea what you like to wear. You have opinions. Daosheng expects me to indulge mine. Shall we go look in her closets, then?"

Your hands are full of pearls and you are not exactly sure what to do with them, but this is hardly important. "A skirt," you say. "And a coat that has not recently had an encounter with anyone's resonance. Or water."

She laughs. It is the first time you manage that, and you are _so pleased._


	4. Chapter 4

**4\. THEFT**

Murder is so simple, compared to the kind of drunk you want to be. Murder is something you can do with your fingertips. You snatch a person -- a whole person, an Impudite who might have seen an entire corporeal sky, and more than once -- you wrap your palm around their mouth and your forearm around their ribs and you pull them into the alleyway you're standing in. You hold them close to you and dampen their clothes with how your coat drips. They struggle. They know enough about being an Impudite to struggle prettily, but you are unmoved. You feel nothing but cold and ache and misery. You also feel intent: you pull this person apart and you mean it. In Hell, you have to mean it.

It takes longer than you wanted it to, and you are dripping blood along with water when you're done.

You're someone's nightmare, aren't you. Blood caked in all the gold threads of your hair, stinking of iron and ichor.

You leave that alley and hide in another while you dry. You have no idea who that person was, only that they aren't anymore. You press your forehead against the bricks. You think about murdering someone who'd matter. You need to find someone who matters for that to even be a possibility. You mattered. People are out there who would murder you. Claws inside your ribs, tentacles down your throat, talons through the struts of your wings. They'd mean it. Surely they'd mean it.

You are entirely pathetic and tired of being you, just now, and it is in the spirit of being tired of yourself that you stride out of that alleyway and into the most beautiful Stygian establishment you can find.

It is a restaurant inside what might be a cathedral, all fan vaults and distant rose-glass windows, so much vertical space you could be dizzy. The tables swarm with candles, white wax and white flame over white tablecloths in some fabric so thick it falls in pleats. The crowd glitters. It is a Theft crowd, so it glitters like a shrapnel scatter: sharpened nails, scarlet lips, coins and dice and drawn guns, a discarded leather jacket a black oilslick smudge on one of those white tables.

You walk through the doors and no one can stop you. The ruins of your coat swing in great stiff panels around your thighs. There are pearls still on your wrists, cuffs you've escaped with, and you are not the only creature in this place covered in someone else's blood. A demonling hands you champagne in a flute from off a platter, and you hold it in your fingers and watch the bubbles spin in the candlelight and smile.

You are being given a reasonably wide berth. You consider what you look like: not, you think, anymore a Lust Knight slumming in Stygia. You sit yourself down at a table. A Horror there is eating something grilled, with many legs and little suckers. He leans in toward you. There's a spike driven through both his cheeks, and you are mildly curious as to how he is going to make intelligible speech sounds.

"Looking for someone?" he asks. It is a muddy sort of noise. He misses the nuances of tonality.

"All the time," you say.

"Vendetta or just out for a good evening?"

You like this game. Questions are easy. You had worse with Secrets, and they were just trying to understand you. This man wants you to be useful to him. You doubt you will be.

"Neither one," you say, and you smile like the sun has come up for you, which makes him startle and stab harder at his legged thing with his fork.

"Looks like you came from a party," he says.

"It was very quiet." It was. That person only screamed once, and so briefly.

"Prefer something a bit louder, huh? You picked the wrong restaurant for that, sweetheart." He touches your knee, heedless of the blood on your coat. He seems not to mind it. "This one is all politics and finding the right people to piss off--"

His resonance is a chill pressure on your skin, and you shake it off like a shower of water droplets. He has no idea what he is dealing with, you realize -- even if he thinks _half-crazed Knight from some other Word than this_ (and he is only one-third, at best two-thirds right, you have renounced all sorts of titles lately) -- even then, he thinks he can _take_ you.

You could Charm him, but who'd want to.

Your hand around his throat, instead. The champagne glass shattered between your palm and his neck.

"Valentin," Daosheng says, behind you, "he'll get all over the tablecloth. Hello."

You don't want to be relieved. You don't want to be relieved so much that you don't recognize that you are for whole seconds of confusion.

The Habbalite makes a sputtering sound.

Daosheng's hand settles at your waist, cool and firm. "Did he offer to take you home with him? How entirely rude. On first meeting, no less." She hasn't asked you to let go. She is only standing near you, as if you are on the same side.

"Not yet," you say. "He was leading up to it."

"He does that," says Daosheng. "He's a menace at parties, it's dull. Do you want me to leave you to it?"

You put the Habbalite down. He spills into his chair with his hands pressed gingerly to his throat, and he says, "I should have _guessed_ it was one of your pets, Daosheng --"

"Do fuck off, Khazarov."

"This one's rabid, you don't want it."

Daosheng leans forward, her hand still on your waist for an anchor, and snaps her fingers at Khazarov's forehead, _click_. Close enough that her thumbnail draws blood. "You are really not very good at understanding _fuck off_ , are you? No wonder you were getting yourself strangled."

You tilt your head onto Daosheng's shoulder and touch just the tip of your tongue to your upper lip, as if you are considering strangulation again, and this time at Daosheng's command. It isn't quite true, but it isn't quite false either. (If she said, you might.) Her fingers splay wider at your hip; she leans into you. You are like a pair of bookends. You know this image: usually it's twins, or lovers, but allies works as well.

Khazarov gathers himself up as if he is about to dare you both, and then turns back to his meal instead. He takes a forkful of legged thing and maneuvers it past the bar in his mouth, chews, swallows. "Can't you see I'm having dinner," he says once he's finished, "take your creature out of here before it ruins the decor or sets something on fire."

"Why would I set anything on fire?" you ask. You are genuinely curious as to Khazarov's thought process here. You have shown exactly zero pyromaniac tendencies.

Daosheng laughs, a bright sound. "You are the most charming thing I've had on my arm all _day_ , Valentin."

"I wouldn't," you say, though you have no idea why you want to reassure her of this. "Arson is dull, the candles are very pretty as they are --"

"Let me get you a drink," Daosheng says, and she walks you away from Khazarov, just like that. Her hand on your waist. Whatever you meant to have happen is not what is happening. You don't know what is happening. You are in a slow, unfolding endlessness of surprise. Somewhere in it you are being sat down at another table and Daosheng brushes your hair behind your ear and sits beside you.

"Weren't you going to get a drink," you say.

"Someone will bring one," Daosheng says, with all the airy confidence of an aristocrat -- she must be, you misjudged her in the terrible dancing bar before, she meant you to, she is a _Thief_. A Captain, perhaps. Something large enough for bravado and small enough to not have a retinue. She twists the strands of your hair between her fingers and some of the blood flakes off. "Do you dye it? It's so bright, even under the blood."

"Magpie," you say.

"Guilty as charged." She smiles at you.

"No," you say. "Only on the corporeal, and it's easier just to have the vessel made the right way to begin with, bleach is so frustrating."

She nods. She lets go of your hair and covers your hand on the tablecloth with hers. "When did you leave the Tower, Valentin?"

You sigh. You lean back against the rich plush parquet cushions of your chair. You feel boneless and exposed and exhausted. "Four days ago," you say, which is as good as admitting everything at once. You wonder if she feels triumphant, for having guessed right. You wonder what she wants with you. You wonder all these things through a distant grey scrim that is the urge to close your eyes and stop talking or thinking or doing anything at all.

"Oh, darling," says Daosheng, and keeps holding your hand.

You are dangerously close to crying.

"You're very clever, Daosheng," you say, and there are no tears in your voice, not yet, you sound -- you sound like yourself, like some version of yourself that's recognizable to you. "Tell me how you knew?"

A series of expressions move through her eyes, like she's sorting through options before settling on what she'll say to you. When she says it she says it with a little shrug, an apologetic swipe of her thumb across the back of your knuckles. "You're scared out of your mind. And you act like you know what being scared means."

You laugh, breathless. Shocked.

"And I guessed," Daosheng goes on. "I'm glad I guessed right."

"Why?"

"The other option was Gluttony, and I would have had to justify Gluttony to my partner far more than Nightmares." She laces her hand with yours, finger to finger, the softest inside skin between them touching. The texture is silk. If you rubbed your fingers against hers like this it'd be maddening. Too smooth. Too much.

"If you're looking for someone to take you to the Marches," you say, "I'm not what you're looking for. Not as of recently. Before, I would have. I'd have loved to. You'd be spectacular. You'd twist the air."

Daosheng watches you. Her eyes are huge and even pools. "What would you have done with me?"

"Taken you out so far. Let you see the sand wastes and the dust and the slipstream. Let you get yourself in so much trouble."

"Would you have given me to your Princess, Valentin? Afterward. When you were finished. After we'd had ourselves a good time."

You don't know what answer she wants. You don't know what answer _you_ want. Four days ago, you would have thought this was a silly question. You do still, except it's not, because there is a right answer, there's an answer that makes her leave her hand where it is, every fractional shift cool and soft, texture on texture, the only anchor you've had since you ran, and that isn't supposed to be happening, none of this is supposed to be happening.

"You steal hearts," you say. "If I left you alone in the Far Marches you'd cause terrible havoc."

"I do," she says. "Most of the time, the people I steal from don't even regret it afterward."

"Without hearts?"

"Oh, you can have a Heart if you want one," she tells you. The words are close, in Helltongue; the Heart that's the singing part of your soul, the heart that's the center of you. "Free of charge."

"Now you're the one asking me to go home with you."

She laughs. "If you think I'm as rude as Khazarov, I can get you another champagne glass and you can do whatever you like."

You shake your head. "That's too crude for you," you say, "for you it'd have to be wires, like a net, a necklace. Something to panic in. Something as lovely as you."

There is some dim flicker of fear in her eyes, and your heart kicks up faster to see it, desire and shame all at once. She may in fact murder you in the street. "Come home with me, Valentin," she says.

You want to say yes.

"There are problems with my doing that," you say. "I'd give you wires. My former Princess would start there and find worse to go on with. Nettles. Loss. Your tongue would be sludge and rot. You really don't want to ask."

"I want what I want. _Magpie_ , darling. Hush." Supremely confident. Like nothing has ever hurt her in the world, and nothing could.

"You are using me to score political points with that Habbalite," you protest, which is a very stupid protest, as protests go.

"And it won't be the last time, either," Daosheng says decisively. "Come on now, my carriage is outside."

There were more options a moment ago; there was an entire Hell of places you could run, and yet you've found yourself staring at a blank wall, a t-junction at the end of that maze in the Monastery, two choices left. Yes, no. You think you've been tricked. Tricked or resonated, and you wonder, just for a moment, if she's just like you, an Impudite to make you trust her so fast, so sure, so blindingly right.

You've been Charmed before, of course you have, for pleasure and for harm; the desperate relief you felt then is how you feel now.

"Are you sure you're a Calabite," you ask, getting to your feet.

Daosheng raises both eyebrows, tilts her head to the left, consideringly. Snaps her fingers again, just like she'd done with Khazarov, but this time all the candles covering the table shatter at once.

The blood in your mouth is as warm as wax.

The whole restaurant watches you leave together. The candle stunt was, you admit, impressively noticeable. You say as much. Daosheng has still got hold of your hand and she squeezes it. The ragged edges of her wings brush up against the smooth ones of yours; of course she's a Calabite.

In the street the wind is knifelike and chill. It sets you to shivering. Daosheng's lips brush your cheek. You are stung.

There is a palanquin waiting there, a dark box with a pair of Chinese characters painted on the doors in gold, four damned souls to carry it. It looks far too rich to belong to a woman who found you in a terrible line-dancing bar, who had been there for no good reason, who had been dressed to fit in. The doors swing open before you can remember enough Classical Chinese to translate the characters.

The woman who climbs out of it is tall, severely elegant in _jifu_ and _longgua_ , dragon robes like a Confucian minister, her hair falling to her hips in a loose black sheet. Her horns are a head and a half again long, curved faintly backward. Daosheng lets go of you the instant both of her feet are on the ground. Then she takes two flying steps and is caught in the other Calabite's arms, easy and familiar at hip and shoulder.

They kiss open-mouthed.

Daosheng turns in the frame of those hands and meets your eyes. She looks positively smug.

The other Calabite says, with light amusement, "Might I introduce the Marquis Daosheng."

You don't even have time to react, aside from the delicious popping shock of surprise.

"And the Marquis Chaixin," says Daosheng. _Worse_. More. You've written dreams like this. The perfect recontextualization. Everything that didn't make sense about Daosheng, viewed through the frame of Chaixin's arms around her, all the fog unfogged, the glass removed.

You wish, painfully and abruptly, for the material of the Marches, where you could capture this moment fast enough to record it. Paint would never do. Their expressions would change.

"All right," you say. "Yes," you say. And then you curtsey, the panels of your coat spread in your hands, bowing over one outstretched leg and keeping your eyes on Daosheng's the whole way down and up. "Valentin, lately a Knight of Restlessness. How lovely to meet you both."

* * *

There's room for three in the palanquin; there's room for five. Even so, the two Marquises sit on the same side as you. Daosheng's hip presses into yours; she and Chaixin bend their heads together and lean, shoulder to shoulder, like they were sorry for all the time they'd spent not touching. They're between you and the doors, which is good insurance. Not that you couldn't go out the window, or over their laps --

You don't want to. The consideration is reflex.

They are having a conversation which ought to be private and quite deliberately isn't, while the palanquin lurches down Stygian alleyways. They mean you to hear it.

"How fast are we running this," Chaixin asks.

Daosheng tilts a hand. "Faster rather than slower. I don't want to have to go to ground if Nightmares _does_ show teeth."

"We'd manage," Chaixin says. "It'd give them time to settle."

"Since when did we give people time to settle?"

"Not everyone you pick up in a bar is Yuliang," Chaixin says reprovingly, and this gets her kissed. You are fascinated, like a rat is fascinated by the glittering eye of a snake. You catch the movement of their tongues, slick pink flashes.

"Valentin," says Chaixin when she breaks away, "if you have strong or pressing objections to meeting the Prince of Theft, you ought to state them now."

Your fascination shatters like a dropped glass.

You have entirely reasonable objections to meeting the Prince of Anything. They begin with how you have some significant experience with a Prince and nearly all of this experience has been one ecstatic rictus, a razing sort of fear that obliterates much of the actual event and leaves only shards: afterimages of orders, encouragements, punishment. Your eyes red from hysterical tears, your throat raw. Princes – your Princess, your abandoned and pursuing mistress, the dark pit at the heart of the world – you are entirely frightened of them, and this is how you ought to be.

What you say is, "So simple. You pretty Destroyers _ask_ and your Destroyer Prince appears. I ought to have tried it myself and saved days of tromping through Stygia –"

Daosheng taps the back of your hand with her nails, reproving. "You are almost too scared to breathe, aren't you?"

You are breathing fine. The speed of your respiration is not a _problem_. You don't even _need_ to breathe in Hell. You used to spend weeks not bothering, when you were being a shadow and a haunt and lying on your back in the grass on your most-perfect sunlit afternoon.

You put your head in your hands.

Chaixin says, "We don't pick up people we don't care to invest in."

Daosheng's hand settles, still cool, on the back of your neck.

"You are a considerable investment," Chaixin goes on. "You have too many Forces and you're enough of a rarity in Stygia that half of Theft's aristocracy and most of Factions would be after you in a week. If you lasted that long – breathe, Valentin – but we don't bring people into our company who we can't pay for and who we won't defend."

"Princes are not something one defends from," you protest, while you attempt seriously to stop shaking quite as much as you are. Aren't you safe? Haven't you said yes?

"The Boss," says Daosheng, "is going to be _delighted_ that we stole you."

"Is that what you did," you say.

"We're Theft," Chaixin says. There's a fondness under the wrought-jade of her voice, and that fondness is all for her partner. You think you're an indulgence. A treat, scavenged up from the dirt of the sidewalk. You'd very much like to be wrong enough to live past the next half hour.

"We're Theft, and you're with us. Simple." Daosheng brushes her thumb over your nape.

Pull yourself together. Weren't you a manifold terror yourself? Weren't you elegance and surprise and sick realization? Don't you want to show these Calabim what they've caught?

Pull yourself _together_ , Valentin, or else they'll toss you back onto the curb for the scavengers.

When you three climb out of the palanquin you take quick stock of yourself – blood-stiff velvet coat, pearls at cuff and collar, boots, lace around your throat and tying back your hair. What might this creature, moonlit-savage, have stolen? (What might you _show off?_ ) A life, you think, to begin with, but everyone has one of those. Better: you've stolen _attention_ , haven't you? How Impudite of you, to get not one but two Marquises to bring you to Valefor. You let the light catch your cheekbones, glint off your hair and your eyes and throw your mouth and hands into shadow. You think yourself a wraith, a vision.

It'd be easier in the Marches, but so would _everything_ , so what's the point, Valentin?

One Marquis on either side of you, and all of you in front of a golden door. Lounging to the left and to the right are a Balseraph and an Impudite. The Balseraph has eyes like the moon if the moon was a coin.

"Back again," says the Impudite. "Pushing yourselves, aren't you?"

"Nice to see you too, Benjamin," Daosheng says.

The Balseraph winds her way up Benjamin's back and rests her lovely head on his shoulder. She flickers her tongue at you. "This one tastes like _ambitious_ failure," she says, "and like it hasn't washed off its last Word yet."

"Honestly, I'm just waiting for the day one of you comes in alone except for your newest acquisition," says Benjamin. "That'll be fun to see."

"Keep waiting," Chaixin says.

The Balseraph blinks all the eyes on one side of her face and none of the eyes on the other. You read it as a very slow-motion wink. " _I'd_ get bored," she says. "Waiting." She slips to the ground in a pile of moonglow coils.

"Aren't you already?" Daosheng asks her, quite frankly, and for a moment you think you understand the Marquis you are about to serve entirely -- _she does it to everyone_. That glittering scalpel of a conversation. Every time. You are stunned by how dangerous she is. You wonder if Chaixin knows.

(You dare to look at Chaxin, and stop wondering: Daosheng might be dangerous but Chaixin is _sure_.)

"Oh, go in already," the Balseraph says. "The Boss is waiting for you."

* * *

You climb three abreast up a long set of worn marble stairs, the disconnected exit of some street underpass that has emerged from behind that door as if it belonged there. You turn twice on small landings, and your thighs have begun to burn by the time you reach the top.

You catch sight of him piecemeal: boots first, broken-in black leather. He's sitting on a curb under the only tree you've ever seen in Stygia in a wide-legged sprawl, elbows on bent knees. Your eyes are level with his while you're still six steps down and he _knows it_ , looks you straight through. Raises both of his eyebrows, rakish. His eyes are bluish green, deepset in a Mediterranean complexion. You feel – you feel _catcalled_ , with him looking at you, and the Prince of Theft hasn't said a damn word yet.

"Girls," he says, "didn't I see you two a fortnight back? You not having enough of a good time?"

"There's not such a thing, Boss," says Daosheng.

"We make our own entertainment," Chaixin adds.

"Of course you do. Come on up. What'd you bring me?"

You are pathetically glad of Daosheng's fingers brushing yours as you three climb the last stairs. Valefor's on his feet and stalking an appraising circle around you.

"A _kitten_ ," he says. "This one's got to be your pick, Daosheng, you're a sucker for the big eyes and the pretty hair. Just look at your girlfriend. Hey, kitten." He puts two fingers under your chin and lifts it. You swallow. You wonder, very clearly, what it will feel like to have your Forces shred to nothing. You've only ever found out from the other side.

"Hello," you say.

"Little bedraggled for something as big as you are, mm?"

"Your Principality," you say, "is damp and windy and full of all sorts of disreputable company. I was better dressed when I arrived."

Valefor snorts. You do not die yet. "Kitten has claws! No wonder you like them."

"We like sharp," says Chaixin. "You don't want this one wandering around unsupervised."

"Oh, _that_ kind of sharp, huh? Kitten, come on over here."

You find yourself perched on Valefor's thigh under that tree. The dim Stygian light falls in dapples on your shoulders and your cheeks. You think of a park by a river. A bridge. Sunlight. That wasn't Hell. You could add to it, now. Just slightly. A refinement. You don't look at Daosheng. If you do you'll ask for help.

"How pissed is Beleth with you?" Valefor asks.

"More now that I'm not available to be dismembered," you say, which is fairly honest as assessments go.

"That's Djinn for you. Always wanting what they haven't got. You done with that?"

"I'm not about to turn myself over to the Game, if that's what you're asking," you say. You drop your eyelashes to a scrim across your vision, look straight at him through them. "Sir." It's amateur. It's crude. You _absolutely don't care_.

Valefor barks laughter. "I bet the last time you looked at somebody like you're looking at me you were about seven Forces high. Cute. Hey, kitten, what do you want that you haven't got?" 

You do not want to answer this question.

You know the answer that's true: you want the Ethereal, you want dreamstuff melting under your hands like mercury, you want the taste of human minds gritty and malleable under your tongue, and you have none of that, and you are in the process of giving it up entirely so that you can stop wanting to simultaneously be drunk and murder strangers, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to want to stop doing, and if you say any of this Valefor will probably throw you back down the stairs.

And now you're hesitating. Long enough for him to notice. You wonder if you'll feel entropy like a crack in the air before it hits you. Lightning-strikes.

"Everything," you say, which is both a synecdoche for the truth and utterly a lie made for the Prince of Theft, who takes and takes and takes and if only he'll take you and get it _over with already_.

"That is going to take you ages to fix," says Valefor. "Trust me, kid, I'd know."

His hand is on the upper outside of your thigh, pinning you in place. You feel as if you are about to vibrate out of your skin. "I don't have much of a choice about trusting you," you say. 

"Not even a little bit of one."

"I'd rather serve you than anyone else in Stygia," you say. You have apparently decided to tell the truth as far as it is relevant. This is a very dangerous cliff to walk along. You are so ready to fall.

"Would you," Valefor says. "Even over pretty little Daosheng, you'd choose me. I'm flattered."

"Boss," says Daosheng. It's nearly a protest. You want to this conversation to _stop happening_.

He grins at her, all teeth.

Chaixin says, "Boss," like she isn't afraid at all, and you know quite well that's a lie, she is terrified (what does a creature like Chaixin fear most: _loss_ , or _threat_ , you're trying to find the nuance between the two ideas but you're so distracted), "we're counting on you preferring that a former Knight of Nightmares not to get snatched up by Malphas."

"I wouldn't," you protest, because you wouldn't. Because you want this conversation to be over. "Factions is placards. And Alaemon's _mazes_."

"Then I guess you're stuck with me, kitten."

You are. The Demon Prince of Theft slides the hand he's got on your thigh around and up under your skirt, casual as anything. You are entirely trapped. His fingertips are hot callouses scraping upward, just slow enough that you know you're being _enjoyed_. You bite the inside of your cheek. All the Forces you have and you can't do a single thing about this. 

Your Marquises are watching you. All your blood is burning in your cheeks or rushed down between your legs where a Prince has shoved half his hand inside of you without any hesitation. Penetration is such a simple metaphor. You were never one for simplicity when you were selecting metaphors but perhaps you'll reconsider the merits of being held open and invaded and _taken_ in the future, there are fingers between the Forces that make you up and this isn't even -- you've had your share of unwise and very exciting sex and this isn't even the same species of experience, this is a parallel but wholly different thing and Valefor turns his hand and sinks into you to the wrist and you make some kind of shocked noise.

"You're all twisted up with attunements," Valefor says. He strokes some inward part of you that you didn't previously know had feeling. "Can't have that."

It is not so much _tearing_ as _rearrangement_. 

You lose track of time, and of what you're doing with your hands. You remember clinging to his shoulders and you remember screaming and you remember parts of your mind going _dark_ , like they've been turned off, like Valefor has cut them away. You knew how to look at anyone and know what they feared; _gone_. You could reach for it but it would be like reaching with amputated limbs.

Because he is the Prince of Theft, when he gives you _his_ attunement for your Band, he does it with a twist of his hand that makes you come as hard as you ever have for anyone.

He puts you back on your feet, pristine as you were when you sat down. You push your hair out of your eyes with fingers that aren't even unsteady. 

"There you go, Valentin," says your Prince. "Scraped clean. On the inside at least."

You aren't sure if you have the voice to _thank_ him, and less sure if you want to. You try curtseying instead, and learn that it's not your fingers that are shaky, it's your _legs_. 

"Take your kitten home, girls, wash them up a bit."

You chance a look at Chaixin and Daosheng. They're holding hands, white-knuckled like children. Daosheng is flushed scarlet across both cheeks and Chaixin's eyes glitter, fever-glassed black opals. 

"Go on," says Valefor, and snaps his fingers. 

You go.

* * *

The palanquin takes you back. You spend most of the trip with your head in Chaixin's lap and Daosheng winding her fingers through your hair. They talk in Chinese, which you aren't bothering to pay enough attention to to understand. You are feeling your way around yourself, like prodding the inside of your mind with your tongue, looking for raw places. There _aren't any_. You are seamless. Your new Prince does excellent work.

Daosheng loops her hand around yours when you arrive, and so you walk into her territory right next to her, while Chaixin stays to deal with the palanquin and the souls carrying it and some subordinate -- an Impudite like you, but dark-haired and pretty and clearly someone Chaixin trusts with paperwork, he has a whole sheaf of it and still manages to look at you with inquisitive eyes when you go past. You'd say hello but you'd have to stop walking, and it's so much easier to let Daosheng provide momentum for you both.

"That's Lanthano," she says, "you'll like him -- everyone likes him, it's terribly clever of him -- and he'll like you once you're settled."

You nod; this seems reasonable enough. You are not at your most likeable just this moment.

The Marquises have carved or claimed a warren of passages and rooms carved out of some mountain. It is practically a cave city, soft stone buffed to a polish by bootfalls and the busy hands of souls, and all hung about with what you think are electric lights. They are set in elaborate containers and flicker madly when Daosheng passes by. Vaputech! You wouldn't have expected it in the lair of Calabim, but then you have not expected anything correctly yet about the last twelve hours. There are tapestries and painted screens between the lights. Some of them are very beautiful. It is a thieves' den, if a thieves' den was also a castle and a palazzo and you like it, quite distantly; you are distant from most things right now, most things except for Daosheng's hand and the blanked-out spaces in your soul where you were something other than you have just become. You pass other demons -- Shedim, mostly, which you are curious about but not enough to pause, and another Impudite -- does Daosheng _collect_ them? Are you a prize? Does it matter? -- who flashes your Marquis an impossibly giddy grin and vanishes behind a screen in a flutter of red ribbons and silk hemline flaring out in the still air.

You realize all the screens are doors. It is _quite_ like a city, a hidden city.

Daosheng pushes one of them open and takes you inside. 

"There's furniture and whatever sort of decoration you like, when you get around to it. One of the inside rooms is a bath and the other one is a glorified closet but you ought to have space, I think," she says to you. There will _need_ to be decoration, you decide: there's nothing in this room but a floor and two doorways leading on to further rooms beyond. "And you have three whole days, which is wonderful -- I think it'll be more than enough time."

"Oh," you say, "three days will just barely acquaint me with all the interesting people you've acquired."

Daosheng grins. It is the same grin that was on the face of that Impudite in the hall, in its original version. (It is almost Valefor's. Almost. You think of teeth. Daosheng's are sharp.) "You'll have to come back afterward, then, won't you," she says. "That's the secret of being stolen, Valentin. Coming back."

"Is it?"

"Welcome to the company," she says. She brushes your hair behind your ear. Her fingers fall through the lace of your collar and resettle it. "Come see me when you're ready."


End file.
